Vincent Skimenti Movies

The serpentine plotline of Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita begins its 117-minute slither when punkish, psychotic, and drug-ridden Nikita (Anne Parillaud) fires her gun into a cop's face following the stick-up of a drug store, and is promptly imprisoned. She is thrown into a dank cell, then injected with a substance and told it is a lethal toxin. Instead of dying, however, the comes to in an all-white interrogation room, where French intelligence officer Bob (Tchéky Karyo), informs her that an alternate to execution exists: she can receive covert government training as an assassin. She accepts the bid, is rigorously trained, and later returns to society as a seemingly normal and gentle civilian, but falls in love with a drugstore employee while she's waiting for that first government assignment. The paradoxical concept of a young woman blossoming socially while carrying out cold-blooded murders was downplayed when La Femme Nikita was remade in America as the silly and disappointing Point of No Return, directed by John Badham with Bridget Fonda in the lead. A far less sociopathic TV-series version of La Femme Nikita surfaced on the USA cable network in early 1997. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting is the film most responsible for bringing director Raul Ruiz to international prominence. The intricate film is structured as an unfolding puzzle, a bafflingly complex mystery where the detectives use the techniques of art history. The film is narrated by an art collector and an unnamed interviewer who dissect a series of six 19th-century paintings. The collector argues that certain imperfections in the artwork -- errors in perspective, anachronistic objects, misplaced shadows -- are not in fact imperfections, but clues left by the artist. He feels these are keys to a larger secret, one related to a grand historical conspiracy. However, this theory presupposes the existence of a seventh painting, the crucial, missing link in the chain. The collector believes this painting has been stolen, but the interviewer claims it never existed. Ruiz transforms these academic discussions into cinema by exploring the riddle of the paintings from the inside. He re-creates each painting with live actors and real locations then views the scenes from different angles, presenting a visual equivalent to the spoken analysis, a meditation on history, art, and the problem of interpretation. ~ Judd Blaise, Rovi